FORT LEWIS – Saying he had been “careless and stupid,” Spc. Ryan G. Anderson faced a military jury Thursday night and begged for forgiveness.
With tears in his eyes, he turned in the witness chair and faced the six men and three women who two hours before had branded him a traitor by convicting him of five counts of betraying his country.
He also begged for mercy from the same panel that was about to deliberate how long a sentence he will receive. The jury was still deliberating late Thursday.
“I beg for you and your families to find in your hearts to forgive me,” said the Lynnwood soldier during his court-martial trial for treason. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. Please give me the opportunity to redeem myself.”
Anderson told jurors that while he was growing up, “most of my friends were misfits. We were friends because they weren’t friends with anyone else.”
Anderson was just one of several people who testified at the sentencing phase. Under military law, juries recommend sentences.
He was charged with attempting to make contact with al-Qaida terrorists and of trying to divulge how to damage war vehicles and kill American soldiers. The jury took a little more than four hours to convict him.
His mother, who lives in Arizona, and his father, an Everett resident, testified on his behalf, saying he’d had a fascination for aircraft and the military while growing up. The wife of the commander of Anderson’s National Guard company testified for the prosecution, saying Anderson’s arrest hit soldiers and their families hard.
“I myself lost trust that the people would come home safe,” said Jacqueline Harcrow of Yakima. She said news about Anderson spawned fear among the families left behind when the unit deployed to Iraq.
“There was fear that they were going to be injured or killed,” she testified.
The government traces Anderson’s activities from Oct. 6, when he posted a message on an extremist Islamic Web site using the name Amir Abdul Rashid and asking how to join his “brothers” in the cause against the United States.
He was arrested Feb. 12, three days after he met two undercover counterintelligence agents in a sport utility vehicle parked at a Seattle Center garage.
It was during this meeting that Anderson, apparently eagerly, told the people he believed to be members of the al-Qaida terrorist network how to disable U.S. war machines, including the M1 tank, and how best to kill American soldiers. The meeting was secretly recorded, and the video was played for the jurors.
“Members, you know who the accused considers his brothers, and it’s not members of the United States Army,” government prosecutor Maj. Melvin Jenks told the jury Thursday in closing arguments.
“The defense has put up a mask to hide the real Spc. Anderson, the real Amir Abdul Rashid,” Jenks said. “Members, pull back that curtain, put out that fire and see Amir Abdul Rashid for what he is – a traitor.”
The defense contended that Anderson could not legally form the intent to commit a crime, partly because of mental health issues that experts talked about during the trial.
Pointing to Anderson at the defense table, Maj. Joseph Morse said: “Is that really the face of evil? Is that a person who would give information to the enemy, or is something going on here?”
Numerous times throughout his argument, Morse referred to expert medical testimony by telling jurors that Anderson wasn’t “wired like the rest of us.”
His defects made him prone to exaggerate, lie and role play. The gist of the defense was that Anderson was egged on by undercover intelligence agents and became easy prey for a government sting operation.
In addition, Morse insisted that none of the information passed on to people Anderson thought were al-Qaida operatives would have helped the terrorist organization because the material was already available to the terrorists or could be found on the Internet.
The jury examined 200 text messages, an hourlong video and dozens of e-mails exchanged between Anderson and the people pretending to be al-Qaida members.
In the video, Morse asked the jurors to note that there was no malice, hatred or venom in the way Anderson spoke. He said his “good idea filter” was broken, and that affected his decision making and role playing.
That may be true, Jenks countered, but what Anderson talked about in the video was how to kill U.S. soldiers, and “that’s not fantasy; that’s not role playing.”
Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or haley@heraldnet.com.
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